Left Out Program Notes for March 7, 2006

Welcome to Left Out, reality-based independent radio on WRCT
88.3FM, and on the worldwide web at leftout.info. Left
Out discusses the news from a perspective left out of the mainstream
media. Left Out is co-hosted by Bob Harper and
Danny Sleator. Today's program is produced
by Matt Hornyak. Listeners are invited to call the program at (412)
268-WRCT (9728), or to send email to
bob@leftout.info

Listen

Guest: Carl Johnson

Pittsburgh resident Carl Johnson is involved in the disaster relief
efforts for hurricane Katrina in coastal Mississippi. He worked with
a group of volunteers out of a Lutheran church who helped local
citizens get back on their feet, do repair work, set up kitchens, etc.

Election Board Meeting of February 27

One of us (Danny Sleator) attended this meeting. The board was
discussing its recent decision to sign a contract with Sequoia Systems
to supply the County's voting machines.

Let me mention two things that happened at the meeting that
just made me want to scream.

John Defazio stated that "there are no certified machines that had
a voter verifiable paper trail." It eventually became apparent
that he was under the false impression that op-scan machines did
not supply a "voter verifiable paper trail". So, although he had
vigorously supported (as did all the county council members) the
idea of an audit trail, when it came time for him to make a
choice, he blew it. He apparently thought a voter verifiable
paper trail HAD TO BE a DRE with "cut and drop" printer
attached!

That after nine months of work, and after a half dozen
public meetings at which members of the community (including
me) had made this point again and again --- that he could
still be so confused on such a basic level is truely
amazing and truely discouraging.

At some point a member of the public gallery said "what are
you going to do if the results of the election turn out to
be wildy improbable, and you cannot do a recount". Dan
Onorato's response was "the current lever machines
don't have a paper trail either".

That comment demonstrates that he has absorbed ABSOLUTELY
NOTHING from months and months of work and testimony from
people like Dave Eckhardt -- who explained PRECISELY THIS
ISSUE to the committee at the last meeting. ELECTRONIC
MACHINES ARE NOT LIKE MECHANICAL MACHINES!

At some point, before taking public questions, Onorato asked
the audience to please "only make new points and bring in
new information" because of all the public hearings that
we've had. Well, I'm sorry Dan. You and the rest of the
committee have demonstrated a sub-kindergarden ability to
absorb the BASIC FACTS about the decision you're trying to
make. Under these circumstances what else can we do be keep
repeating stuff over and over and over and over!

The Post-Gazette Chimes in

The Post-Gazette published an
editorial on Friday
applauding Onorato's decision. It included the same canard that
Onorato mentioned above --- that paper trails are "not necessary,"
because the current machines don't have them.

The editorial is jam packed with false, misleading, and just plain
stupid statements. Let's look at part of it:

The lack of a paper trail has moved some voting activists to favor an
optical scan system, which employs paper ballots filled in by
voters. Their concerns are not without merit -- rigging elections has
a sordid history in the United States -- but their fears also have a
computer distrust aspect to them.

After all, they are asking for proof that is not now available with
the mechanical machines. Further, it is ironic that their preferred
remedy for more Florida debacles would turn out to be voters marking
paper ballots -- an echo of what caused the problem in the first
place.

Just in these two paragraphs we have:

equating mechanical machines with no paper trails to electronic ones
A completely false analogy --- among other things, electronic
machines behavior totally change when the software is changed.

falsly dissing optical scan systems by saying it's an "echo" of
what happened in Florida. This is just nonsense. The problems in Florida
were caused by PUNCH CARDS and BUTTERFLY BALLOTS, neither of which
have anything to do with optical scan ballots.

dismissing the critics as having irrational "computer distrust".
This is perposterous --- the people MOST CONCERNED about this are
precisely those who have the MOST SOPISTICATED understanding of
computer technology.

The article also goes on criticize optical scan machines with this
"argument":

Americans trust computers for life-and-death functions every day, and
it seems to us that paper ballots run through a scanner are not how
most Americans will vote as the 21st century advances. For one thing,
the cost of printing up hundreds of thousands of ballots every
election would prove expensive over the long haul.

Trusting computers for "life-and-death functions" is not at all
the same thing. For one thing, those are not at all adversarial
situations --- there's no motivation to kill somebody by having an
x-ray machine inject too much radiation into a person. Also, it's
just a fact that the standards of software quality that goes into
building those kinds of "fly by wire" applications are not even
remotely being followed for voting machines. And these are
additional reasons to demand a voter verifiable paper trail.

The cost argument is completely bogus. They are simply have not
looked into the cost issues at all. The DRE machines (touch
screens) have been proven again and again to be MUCH MORE
EXPENSIVE than optical scan machines.

Finally, "a scanner are not how most Americans will vote as the
21st century advances." So this is not "how it will be done" in
their naive narrow vision of the 21st century? That's an argument?

By the way, here's a letter Danny Sleator sent to the
Post-Gazette on January 7, which they never published:

On September 13, 1998 the editors of the Post-Gazette called
for President Clinton to Resign. His crime was having an
affair with Monica Lewinsky, and lying about it. At about
the same time dozens of other papers across the country also
called for his resignation.

Now we have a president who has lied repeatedly to the
American people and to Congress about matters of war and
peace, with dire consequences that we all know about. Yet
there have been no calls for his resignation or impeachment
by any major newspaper. Why?

Bush has initiated illegal wiretapping. Bush has locked up
American citizens for years without charge. Bush has
illegally used the powers of his office to punish his
critics.

Bush has violated international law by attacking a country
that posed no threat to the US. He has advocated and
approved the use of cruel and degrading interrogation
methods in violation US and international law.

And this does not even mention any of the legal things that
he is doing that are seriously endangering our future (such as
putting the country into massive debt, cutting taxes for the
rich, gutting FEMA, the Mine Safety and Health
Administration, and the EPA, opposing the Kyoto accords, not
developing a coherent energy policy).

Yet there have been no calls for his resignation or
impeachment by any major newspaper.

Follow-up on the 60-Minutes Bush/Guard Story

Before the 2004 election, 60-Minutes did a piece about how Bush evaded
the draft. They uncovered some memos that showed that Bush was using
his connections to get into the Texas Air National Guard. (Not exactly
a big surprise.) The right-wing blogosphere kicked into action and
"proved" that the memos were forgeries. The basis of of the claim is
that the typewriting technology used in the memos did not exist at the
time they were supposed to have been written.

The story blew up into a major embarrassment for CBS. In the end Dan
Rather lost his job as news anchor, and several excellent 60-Minutes
producers lost their jobs. This was pretty much the end of the
mainstream media coverage of this story.

Well, it turns out that the typeface analysis was totally bogus. Mary
Mapes, one of the fired producers at 60-Minutes has written a book
(Truth and Duty: The Press, President and the Privilege of Power)
about her experiences. One of the things she discovered is that
typing of the kind used in the disputed memos is common among
contemporaneous memos from the same National Guard organization.
Here's a quote from her Democracy Now interview of February
10:

And everyone from the Drudge Report to websites I had never heard of,
like FreeRepublic.com. LittleGreenFootballs, all kinds of other
conservatives sites, attacked the story, all of them claiming that the
documents were not authentic, that they had been forged, and they were
citing really obscure type-face issues that I think really confused
most Americans as being proof that they were forged.

They were also, by the way, totally and completely wrong. One of the
things I did in the book was continue to research and find examples
from within the National Guard archives in Texas that showed all the
typeface issues and proportional spacing and all this stuff that they
accused us of having overlooked, those examples were all in place in
the archives. So their complaints were complete B.S.

This aspect of the story has gotten no play in the mainstream media.
Everybody is left with the false impression that 60-Minutes
erroneously based its story on forgeries.

Bush -- of Course -- Knew What He Was Saying was False

Investigative journalist Murray Waas is reporting
President Bush was personally delivered intelligence reports before
the Iraq war that cast doubt on his administration's stated reasons
for launching an invasion. One report, delivered in January 2003, said
Saddam Hussein was highly unlikely to attack the United States unless
"ongoing military operations risked the imminent demise of his
regime." Another intelligence report dated October 2002 said both the
Energy Department and the State Department's intelligence bureau had
concluded Saddam Hussein's attempts to purchase aluminum tubes were
"intended for conventional weapons." Waas writes that the disclosure
is the first evidence that the president himself knew of the sharp
debate within the government over the aluminum tubes during the time
that he, Cheney, and other members of the Cabinet were citing the
tubes as clear evidence of an Iraqi nuclear program. Neither the
president nor the vice president told the public about the
disagreement among the agencies."

On Pharmacists' Choice

There's an organization called "Pharmacists for Life" who support
pharmacists who refuse to fill perscriptions for Plan B a so-called
"Morning After" pill that prevent a potential pregnancy from
starting. They can be taken within 72 hours of having unprotected sex
to prevent the pregnancy.

The problem, specially in rural areas, is that a woman can't
necessarily easily go to another pharmacist if one refuses her. And
there's very limited time window in which the drug is effective.

House Bill 2217, written by state Rep. Dan Frankel (of Squirrel Hill)
is designed to prevent such actions from depriving women of getting
legally prescribed and appropriate medication.

In defense of pharmacists right not to fill perscriptions, they
present this argument:

Pharmacists are not mind-numbed robots who operate without critical
thinking, They do not park their moral, ethical and religious values
at the door, as if they were some kind of schizoid personality.

There's an important connection to a point made by our guest two weeks
ago, Sam Harris. (And the City Paper article does not make it.)
You have to look at details of the arguments being made by the pharmacists.
Consider two types of arguments:

I see that you're about to start taking these two drugs together.
Research has shown that this can sometimes cause horrible consequences.

And

My religious beliefs tell me that preventing a fertilized egg from
developing into a person is equivalent to murder. Therefore I
refuse to fill this prescription.

One is based on reproducible scientific studies that show that the
combination of drugs is dangerous. The other is simply an
unjustifiable religious position. The notion that these two different
scenarios are somehow equivalent, and cannot be distinguished is
ludicrous.

NASA Cuts Research

The agency's administrator, Michael D. Griffin, says NASA needs the
money to keep the space shuttle fleet aloft, complete the
International Space Station and build a new crew exploration vehicle
to replace the shuttle.

I read an article in Scientific American (aluded to above,
but not included on-line). It makes an interesting point
about long manned space missions. It points out that the
radiation you'd get on a space craft travelling to mars
would be huge. In 1 year, you'd get as much radiation as
nuclear workers are allowed in a lifetime. Getting to Mars
would probably take 2 years. And it points out that there
are currently no known feasible methods to avoid this.

Am I missing something? Is it really reasonable to send
people to Mars, only to have them die a horrible death of
cancer in a year or two? Is this what is being
contemplated? Is the idea to just send people to Mars and
have them die there after a year or two?

Any long-term populated colony on Mars or the moon will have
to be underground for the same reason.

This whole manned space travel thing is a crock of shit that
should be jettisoned as soon as possile. Robotic space
missions are the only way to go.. People have to get used
to the fact that this is our only planet, and we god damn better
take care of it.

Ignorant Republicans

The school board of Pittsburgh suburb Upper St Clair
voted last night to terminate
the International Baccalaureate curriculum in their school district on the
spurious grounds that the $80,000 per year cost is "too high" (out of total
annual budget of approximately $50,000,000). Previously the school board
members advocating its termination described the
program as "Marxist" and
"anti-Christian" and "un-American", revealing much more about the speaker than
the program. This is another example of Republican wingnuts destroying our
society by fostering ignorance and undermining education. Listeners are
encouraged to visit the IBO web site for actual
information about the program, which emphasizes international education.

Authoritarian Republicanism

We've commented frequently on the deeply authoritarian streak running through
the heart of contemporary Republican politics, and particularly exemplified by
the fascistic
tendencies
of the Cheney Administration. A recent
column
by Glenn Greenwald beautifully summarizes the cult of personality surrounding
George W. Bush.

Robertson Watch

Little Ricky's Little Trickies

The junior senator from Pennsylvania has quite a few
tricks
up his sleeve for financing his suburban Virginia lifestyle. Not to mention
having billed the Penn Hills School District for schooling his children, even
though he lives in Virginia. Come November, just say no to Little Ricky.

By the way, Tricky Ricky continues to lag way behind his democratic opponent, Casey.
According to this recent poll
he's behind by double digits.